The Place where Compassion and Politics Meet
I came to Kevin Winchell’s office to tell him this:
Almost two years ago, in the fall of 2016, Rinker Auditorium overflowed with so many students (and a few brave faculty) that I had to sit on the floor to watch presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump jab at each other in the 2016 presidential debate.
Anytime either the Democratic or Republican nominee would fling mud, some opposite part of the room would clap and cheer.
The uglier the rhetoric competition became, the louder, more violent the praise.
I wanted him to help me understand this political tribalism that fed my growing disillusionment.
“They go for the show,” he answered playfully, “The students who show up to an event like that tend to already have their minds made up. They go for the entertainment.”
Not surprising.
In his cramped, purple office, I nodded but tried to spin the conversation more philosophical. I postulated, with a dash of cynicism, that this was obviously related to young peoples’ clutching, wrestling, straining for identity (how annoying of them) and the sedative effect of belonging to a group, especially a political one.
To which he agreed (“Sure.”) and then offered a mature explanation for how things like political beliefs are literally hard-wired into the brain. Synthesizing bits from George Lakoff’s The Political Mind, Kevin compared it to learning Italian. “If you’re not exposed to Italian when you’re young, it’s going to be really hard for you to pick up Italian later on.” The same is true for political ideologies. He continued:
“It’s really hard to learn a different ideology when you get older because your brain has been structured over decades to connect one neuron with another through a synapse and so it’s easier for you to think a certain way than it is another one because that’s how your brain has been trained already.”
Alright. There’s a biological consideration. Sure.
But all my compassion training, i.e. reading Ram Dass and Brene Brown and taking up meditation, has led me to believe that extending compassion is the most important, most difficult work one can do, and that college students who howl at people insulting each other probably aren’t the prime distributors.
So what if political disharmony and political violence in thoughts, words, and actions by members of opposing parties, is a defect of an entirely different ailment?
An interest in spirituality and Jungian theory furthered my convictions about humanity’s ultimate “oneness”. Jung propagates this idea of a network of consciousness. He claims our individual minds are like satellites connected to a mainframe, what Jung would call “the collective unconscious”. The idea is if you go far back enough in my mind and Ferlinghetti’s mind and Kim Kardashian’s mind and Jane Goodall’s mind, you’ll get to the same place. Some define it as a pool of shared primordial archetypes and universal instincts. Some consider it the place from which all the individual minds arise. Either way, Jung’s hypothesis oozes spiritual: All humanity shares an unconscious “mind” and by virtue of this, we are, unequivocally, one.
So, if we follow these claims of a metaphysical connectedness, then, in accordance with his theory, all that humanity would need to do is dust off any ignorance of our inherent bond to see that any outer differences like political beliefs are areas where the individual, satellite minds do not realize its connection to the mainframe.
Consider Mother Teresa’s own variation: “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
Beyond the biology, maybe political disagreement and subsequent hatred of difference is a symptom of a spiritual ailment. With these axioms, it sets up the remedy to look like this: develop compassion because of the ultimate realization of the interdependence of humanity.
And so all of this speculation and thought excavation (and my Magazine Writing class assignment) brought me to Kevin’s office.
Kevin Winchell, official title: Associate Director of Community Engagement, unofficial title: the guy in full Uncle Sam costume at Stetson’s straw polls, works in the very back office of the decomposing house-turned-Center-for-Community-Engagement on Bert Fish Drive. He doesn’t mind the sugar cookie purple walls. They were painted by a Bonner student a few years back. They’re fun.
With degrees in Philosophy and Political Science and an MBA, all from Stetson, he supports student civic engagement programming and works as the Training Coordinator for the Volusia County Democratic Party and exudes a persona of conflicting ideas: the political nice guy. A slender, smile-y man who speaks syllogism, Kevin listened attentively and genuinely to my yarn-spinning.
That in itself began to unravel my cynicism.
When we started talking, I realized that I didn’t really want him to help me understand my disenchantment. I wanted him to confirm my feelings that politics lacks compassion, that we’re selfish ninnies who don’t care about doing the right thing, that we care more about identity labeling and group belonging than doing the work of extending consideration and non-judgment.
This was, of course, bacon-wrapped in irony when I realized that my own relaying of the debate scene was loaded with a slew of judgments, profiling, and non-extending-of-compassion-ness.
While all of the analysis and overcooking can seem to be productive, Kevin, probably because he’s a person who cares about tangible solutions to tangible problems, directed the conversation elsewhere and I followed, hopeful.
He sort of broke into song about higher education and democracy, making useful assertions, rather than looking to point fingers like I originally was. He chose not to criticize college students for unproductive manifestations of political identity, but rather to riff about higher education’s degree of responsibility in a democracy.
It’s exactly this kind of dialogue and gentle re-framing in conversation that can bring about understanding across difference and possibly, in incremental ways, mitigate uncompassionate response in political discourse.
The way I see it, this is where compassion and politics meet: dialogue.
Kevin, a cheerleader of democracy, near the end of our meeting, gently elaborated and sort of glided into a manifesto, in fitting political fashion:
“That’s higher education’s founding purpose. [It] was not to help you make more money than you could have if you’d only gone to high school. It’s to turn you into a citizen that’s gonna help solve the biggest challenges facing our world. That’s why they created universities in the first place was because they realized…It’s going to take people who are really smart and know what they’re doing who have the ability to discern what information is true or false, who have the ability to understand arguments and where premises may be fallacious or faulty or whatever else. People who are able to have dialogue across difference and recognize with a humble attitude that there may be things that they don’t know that other people do and it’s good to listen to that sometimes and respond appropriately when you are wrong and change your argument when evidence contradicts what you’re saying. All those sorts of critical thinking skills, civil dialogue skills, intellectual honesty and humility, that’s the foundation of a liberal arts education. And that’s what we need more than anything else in our leaders, in our country, in our world.”
“So, yeah, higher education has a responsibility to our democracy to inculcate in our students the civic habits and skills necessary for a healthy democracy.
If it’s not in higher education, if not us, then who?”
